PUBLISHERS leaving 90% on the table selling through programmatic channels (CPM floors are not being enforced in all observed cases)  https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/publishers-leaving-90-table-selling-through-programmatic-fou-pg4xe

publishers/sellers, let me know if you can corroborate, or if you think I'm wrong

So we went live with VDO.ai for about 3 months that ended 4 months ago. From that point on, no sign of any payment from these guys. They keep telling us that they would soon pay and coming up with random excuses for why they didn't. Beware and stay away. Any advice on how to tackle this?

Posts that I've found about the same from the last 3 months:

https://www.reddit.com/r/adops/comments/ktjti7/what_to_do_for_non_payment_from_ad_partner_vdoai/

https://www.reddit.com/r/adops/comments/kfi9es/vdoai_dont_want_to_pay_me_may_and_june_revenue/

https://www.reddit.com/r/adops/comments/jk8edj/is_vdoai_fraud/

Update:

The rep we were talking to over at VDO.ai has just told us that she is "leaving". Our last conversation was just 3 days ago... Take it as you will...

Hey y’all — needed to vent and maybe find a lead here.

I’ve been grinding in the Ad Ops space for the past couple years. I know ad servers like the back of my hand. Seriously — trafficking, campaign QA, optimization tricks, programmatic workflows — you name it, I’ve done it.

I’ve been interviewing like crazy lately — probably with 7 or 8 companies. I sometimes make it to the final rounds. In one case, I went through 5 rounds, including a take-home assessment that felt like I was solving a client pitch solo. Company based in NYC. After waiting over a week… I get a rejection.

Now here’s where it gets insane: Curious I check who did get hired — and it’s someone with barely any background in Ad Ops. No real ad server experience. Just… the right “look” and vague marketing exposure.

I don’t want to be that person, but let’s be honest — I’m Black, and most of the people I see getting these jobs? They all look alike. Many don’t have the technical depth, don’t have to prove themselves through these over-engineered interview processes, and still get the roles. It’s exhausting. It’s not just about experience, it’s about who gets to be seen as a “fit.”

It’s hard not to feel like no matter how deep your skillset is, you’re still locked out because of how you look.

Anyway… if your Ad Ops team is hiring and you’re actually looking for someone who can do the job, not just fit a mold — DM me. Serious leads only.

Appreciate you if you’ve read this far.

Title says it all.

Quit my job a few weeks ago, and now I’m bored (and would like some money).

DM me if you or someone you know has an opening, looking to start asap, literally hand me the keys and i will start.

Basic info:

• 6+ Years in programmatic, 10 in advertising (social media + search + creative)

• DV360, TTD, Choozle, GT

• Full lead - from concept to launch and analysis

• 100k to 100m, budgets don’t matter only results

• Display, Video, Audio

• Tech, Health, Auto

Literally give me a url and i can send traffic, give me a pixel and i can send leads. It’s easy folks.

Again DM me, love to chat and love to start asap.

Thanks

PS - i am an idiot for quoting before a new gig, my mom yelled at me.

poll on Twiitter

https://twitter.com/acfou/status/1398395195683639303

TAG "certification" is fill out some paperwork, promise you wont do fraud, pay the fee, get the framed certificate. It doesn't solve ad fraud.

Who disagrees?

The other Fou is not the Fou. I am The Fou. AMA

I switched from Freestar to Ezoic after being a little nervous due to the lack of revenue Freestar generated for me , I thought it would be another sales pitch to promise me great results and deliver nothing special.... I was pleasantly surprised! After literally 3 days I could already see my revenue double than that of Freestar! After just over 3 weeks with Ezoic that has now leapt to almost 4 times the revenue. I am still shocked by how much more the website is earning with Ezoic. The onboarding process was very simple , all set up the same day! Alyson Courtney is my account manager and is great to deal with. So if you have a high traffic website and are not generating the ad revenue you expect please try Ezoic! You will not be disappointed. I am gutted I didn't try Ezoic years ago as I have lost thousands on the table with other AD partners!

I’m a veteran publisher, and I’ve never had such a bad experience with a business partner IN MY LIFE! Do yourself a favor, don’t start, and if you did, gently sack Mediavine (Pubnation) - and pick a different partner.

Hi all,

I'm continuing down my coding path having already built an AI-powered digital advertising saas that builds, traffics, and optimizes media plans from just a few prompts. I've now built in a generative AI component as well.

But my next big task is actually building an ad server. I've got over a decade in ad ops so I'm quite familiar with how an ad server operates and its baseline functions. That said, I'm getting kind of sick of the shit monopoly most people are funneled in to for CM360 / Google suite, or just site-serving and relying on pub + internal reporting, all of which is usually trash. Trash because of the huge amount of IVT / bot / fraudulent traffic which honestly nobody cares to try and deal with and simply accepts as a cost of doing business. Further, relying on IAS, HUMAN, or DV can be cost-prohibitive.

So I decided to think of a way to help both the brand side and pub side at the same time through a novel architecture where I use some core ML signals + a custom LLM batch analysis to have a better grasp on user and traffic intent so actual bad traffic has more filtering on top of it. This way we have a better means of understanding ACTUAL human traffic and brands aren't getting billed for the on-average 50% of fraudulent traffic. I can understand if this might be a blow to the bottom line of a pub, but the way to look at it is that if you know your site traffic that's clicking on ads are much closer to real human traffic, your premiums can go up making up for the loss if you were simply running in Google or TTD.

There's a huge mid-market opportunity here between the baseline spend on simple Google Ads and a tier 1 ad network like TTD with a $100k minimum.

So if you're a pub with a small but growing audience (literally even if yuo've got just a couple thousand daily visits), I'd like to chat with you. Even if you've just got the most basic display ads set up or maybe some pre-roll, I'd like to chat and see what I can build against your inventory slots. If nothing else it's a thought exercise with no stakes, and at best you see better ad engagement rates.

I have nothing to sell. Advertisers can use FouAnalytics at no cost -- analytics for their digital media, just like Google Analytics is analytics for websites.

in this post https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-good-programmatic-campaign-looks-like-fouanalytics-augustine-fou/

I show what proper day parting looks like, what pacing set properly looks like, how to check frequency caps are set and working properly, and many other examples.

I’m about 4-5 months into testing these services, here’s the scoop:

Monetize More: not sure their traffic cop works, I got ad serving limited a few weeks after rolling Monetize More ads

Their earnings started out around 50% of Adsense, and stayed there for the 3 or so weeks I tested them for. Could they ramp up? Maybe, but since their traffic cop seemingly failed to not serve ads to possible invalid traffic, I’ll not be able to tell.

Ezoic managed to equal Adsense earnings after several month (maybe slightly improve on) their support team made them stand out like crazy tho, real people work at this company and if shows! Hats off to you Michael & team

Adthrive: boasted they could 100% outperform Ezoic, put me thru scrutinizing and lengthy setup, and before they even they even got to ad implementation, took a look at my Adsense & Ezoic numbers and threw in the towel and said they couldn’t beat what I already had. So much for the pregame boasting but respect for not wasting my time further.

Last word? Ezoic. In every way. But mostly for the people who got your back at that company. That’s a rare thing these days. Very rare.

In the past few years, I've become more involved in the ad ops process of the site I own and I've realized the reason much hasn't been done about Google's monopoly on the ad industry is because it's a small industry and most of our government officials don't even know how this truly operates when you add in GAM (Google Ad Manager), Prebid etc. Even finding someone to help with prebid/GAM on Upwork is tough because most people don't have access to a GAM account to know how it works. 

So I wanted us to compile a list of ways we can help end this monopoly so that we can all take action by forwarding this to our government officials, house representatives and senators to put an end to this unethical practice by Google.

1. Customer Support - If you have an issue with your Netflix account, your can call a number to get help. But for some reason, Google isn't required to provide a support phone number to its GAM, Adsense, ADX, or GAM 360 customers. Most of these costumers just happen to be companies with employees, who earn hundreds of thousands to millions with Google each year. But yet again, Google isn't even required to provide adequate and valid support when needed. Not okay but apparently acceptable when you know you have no competition.

Solution - Google should be required to provide appropriate phone and email support for Google Ad Manager, GAM 360, ADX, and Adsense customers.

2) Ad and Search Monopoly - There is simply no way Google can ethically operate Google Chrome browsers, Google search engine, Google Ads (Adsense, ADX, GAM 360/Google EBDA - Exchange Bidding Dynamic Allocation), and Google Ad Manager (ad server) without running a monopoly. 

Solution - Google should give up or sell at least one of these operations.

3) Ad Server Monopoly - This is probably the most outrageous of all. The fact that Google requires any ad company who wants to use their ad server to give them their prebid prices (ad bidding prices) but refuses to do the same with any other company who wants to provide ad server services and wants to implement Google ads into their system.

This has essentially killed the ad server industry because as we all know almost every site uses Google ads for revenue. So anyone looking to use an adserver that isn't GAM would essentially not be able to because that adserver would not have access to Google ads bidding prices. Amazon is an example. Amazon has to give Google their bidding prices in order to be implemented into GAM, but if Amazon wanted to start their own ad server, they wouldn't be able to implement Google because Google simply refuses to give anyone access to their bidding prices. Therefore, everyone is forced to use GAM which doesn't even provide basic support to the companies who use them.

Solution - Google must allow fair competition in the ad server industry by allowing adserver competitors access to their bidding prices.

WHAT YOU CAN DO RIGHT AWAY - LET'S FORWARD THIS LINK OR THIS MESSAGE TO OUR STATE OFFICIALS SO THEY CAN GET AN UNDERSTANDING OF HOW TO FIX THIS -

https://www.270towin.com/elected-officials/contact-us-senators (An easy way to email or call your senators)

https://www.house.gov/representatives/find-your-representative (Contact your state's house representatives)

AD OPS MODS - PLEASE LETS MAKE THIS A STICKY THREAD SO IT CAN GET OPTIMAL VISIBILITY.

To posters, feel free to add other ideas of how to improve the ad ops industry and end Google's monopoly. Let's compile this information to help our lawmakers take action.

If there's anyone else willing to help - perhaps any lawyers willing to help compile this and bring a lawsuit against Google that might force them to make some of these changes or just someone that can help compile all the ideas shared in here to make a new thread that can be sent to our lawmakers, please feel free to state it below. Thanks.

Been lurking here a while, figured I'd share since this sub helped me pick a partner.

I run 20-0, a free to play sports game (web plus an iOS app). Wild part is the site is only about 3 weeks old, and Playwire has been running the ads for roughly 2.5 of those weeks. So they took me on almost right away, which I honestly didn't expect.

Setup was painless. RAMP runs the demand stack, and I just tag where ads go. I kept control over placements (curated in content slots and a bottom banner, no vignettes or pop ups, didn't want to wreck the UX). The iOS SDK side took a little more back and forth, but their team got me through it.

Biggest thing for me has been having an actual account manager who replies and actually optimizes. Just yesterday they helped me get rewarded video set up for a new game mode.

One thing I'll give them credit for: terms were originally net 60, but I told them I'm an early startup and could really use the cash sooner to put toward growth, they actually worked with me to speed up the payments and get money in my hands faster. Wasn't expecting that kind of flexibility from an ad network.

The ads have been crushing it so far, I'm delivering about 8.5M ad impressions per day with a fill rate of ~80%. From what they've told me, the CPM is still in a ramp-up period as demand channels unlock, but even at a rate of $0.55 or so in the meantime, the revenue has been very impressive.

Happy to answer anything if you're evaluating them.

In the first 2.5 weeks, the average PV RPM is about $4.50, also curious how others' RPMs look on gaming traffic.

(Not paid by Playwire, just sharing my experience!)

But there is hope. Advertising has always been a human-skills business. We just spent a while acting like it was not.

Models do not stake credibility. Models do not have credibility to stake. That is the line. That is the thing that does not get automated.

An argument: https://www.adlingo.org/the-skills-that-survive/

Hi everyone im new , i wish to enjoy my stay. thks

Can anyone suggest me a good video ad network? This year I tested a lot of video ad providers and none of them maintained consistency. Please do not recommend Primis, connatix, STN or Vidazoo.

I tested them and the failed. We have close to 35 Million monthly traffic from Tier 1 and 2 cities.

This isn't as much a question as it is a straight up bitching post of how I'm on my last thread with sales teams that refuse to learn anything about what ops does, then continually bitches about how everything is our fault.

I won't disclose where I work, just that we're a premium content pub in the OTT space. The sales teams have their quotas and whatever bullshit, but are some of the dumbest fucking people I've ever met in my entire life. I have yet to understand how they actually got their jobs and got this far ahead in life in general without falling down open manholes or driving their cars directly into oncoming traffic. Having been in this industry for the better part of a decade it just leaves me completely flabbergasted at how leadership and management are somehow unaware of the complete and utter incompetence or simply turn a blind eye to their behavior. They seem to rely only on their numbers when it comes to a personnel issue, yet when we show them our stats of on time starts, lack of makegoods, and insanely fast trafficking turnarounds, it suddenly becomes perception as being the reality. I've lost my faith in this industry not only because of it's complete lack of diversity on any and all media teams, but because they only hire the biggest fucking morons possible to somehow drive revenue.

How do yall deal with this daily level of bullshit?

As most of you know, programmatic is increasingly important to online advertising. Adops plays a huge role in this, so your input to the conversation is greatly appreciated. I invite you to sub and participate in /r/programmatic. Thanks for your support!

Edit: Just want to clarify that I asked the mod before posting this.